Chalabigate

2005-01-17

A Man of The Shadows

A few days before the New Year, on a crisp, sunny day in the Jordanian capital of Amman, I had tea with Iyad Allawi, the interim Prime Minister of Iraq, on the terrace of an unremarkable limestone villa that serves as the local headquarters for his political organization, the Iraqi National Accord, or the I.N.A. Several Jordanian and Iraqi security men lurked on the edges of the terrace, furtively smoking cigarettes. Only Allawi’s American bodyguard, a man wearing the dark suit and dark glasses of an archetypal Secret Service agent, hovered close by. All the windows of an apartment complex overlooking the terrace were shuttered.

Allawi was on a two-day layover in Jordan on his way back to Baghdad, after spending the Christmas holiday with his wife and three children, who live in London. When I arrived at the villa, he was chatting indoors with a Sunni leader, Sheikh Majed Abdelrazzak al-Suleiman, a chief of the influential Dulaimi tribe from Al Anbar province, which includes Ramadi and Falluja, cities that have been particularly plagued by the insurgency against the American occupation of Iraq. I had recently met the Sheikh, a squat, corpulent man, and knew him to be deeply loyal to Allawi, who is a secular Shiite.

An aide led me to the terrace to wait while Allawi and Suleiman finished their conversation. After a while, Allawi joined me outside. A tall, bulky man with a large balding head, a jutting chin, and the lumbering gait of an old prizefighter, he was wearing the uniform of the modern executive: a gray wool suit, burgundy tie, and blue shirt. A young woman brought us mugs of tea, and returned moments later with Ferrero Rocher chocolates.

Allawi will preside over the first national elections in Iraq since Saddam Hussein’s removal; the elections are scheduled to take place on January 30th. Allawi himself is running for a seat in the Transitional National Assembly, which will have two hundred and seventy-five members. This body will write a new constitution and select a new Prime Minister. Although Allawi has portrayed the elections as a victory for democracy in Iraq, events in recent weeks have not been auspicious. On December 27th, the Iraqi Islamic Party, the main Iraqi Sunni political party, pulled out of the elections, citing security concerns; the same day, a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb outside the home of Abdulaziz al-Hakim, one of the country’s most prominent Shiite leaders, killing fifteen. On January 11th, Allawi admitted in a news conference that “there will be some pockets” of Iraq where violence will prevent people from voting.

The elections were meant to solidify a spirit of Iraqi national unity, but the upcoming vote has only increased the tensions among the country’s ethnic groups. The removal of Saddam abruptly disempowered Iraq’s Sunni minority, which had ruled Iraq for nearly five centuries. The resulting Sunni hostility toward American occupation forces—and their fears of being subjugated by Iraq’s Shiite majority—has inflamed the insurgency. Many Sunnis fear that Shiite parties will win the elections and install an Islamic theocracy closely linked to Iran’s. Some Sunni leaders have called for a boycott of the elections.

I asked Allawi whether he was worried that the elections might lead to more violence. If there was a weak Sunni turnout and the Shiites swept the polls, could this deepen the sectarian split in the country and inspire an all-out civil war? Allawi seemed to choose his words carefully, in order to avoid using the word “Sunni.” He replied, “I may be wrong, of course, but I don’t believe that the ingredients for civil war really exist in Iraq. There are people who are trying to foment religious and ethnic problems in Iraq. The problem of the election is not security; it’s the inclusivity. There are those who are trying to prevent this, by telling people not to vote, by attacking and committing crimes. I have been trying to insure inclusivity by talking to people, even on the fringes of the so-called resistance—tribal leaders from Al Anbar, from Mosul, Shias also, and Kurds.” (Iraq’s minority Kurdish population, concentrated in the north of the country, had flirted with the idea of pursuing independence.)

Allawi told me that he had met with former members of Saddam’s Baath Party. (Allawi began his own career as a Baathist in the nineteen-fifties, when he was young, long before Saddam’s rise to power, at a time when Baathism represented anti-colonialism and pan-Arabism.) “I ask these former Baathists, what is it you want to achieve—to bring Saddam back, to get the multinational forces out of Iraq? If it’s to bring Saddam back to power, forget it—khalas—he’s finished. He ended like a rat, hiding in a hole in the ground. This is not respectable. Or if you want to bring bin Laden or someone like him to Iraq, we’ll fight you room to room. We won’t accept this, ever. If you want to get the multinational forces out, then join the elections. Use your vote to get them out.”

I pointed out that such arguments had not attracted much support. “No,” Allawi said. “The trend is not good.”

An aide came over with a note. Allawi read it and then, turning to me, apologized. There was someone important he had to see; he didn’t tell me who. He asked me to wait until he returned.

After Allawi left, I went inside to talk to Sheikh Suleiman. He and two other men were sitting on black leather sofas in a room decorated with Persian rugs, faux-Hellenistic columns, and oil paintings evoking ancient Mesopotamia. One of the men was the Sheikh’s assistant; the other was Akeel al-Saffar, one of Allawi’s senior aides. The Sheikh wore a gray dishdasha robe with ornate diamond-and-silver cufflinks.

I had visited Suleiman a week earlier, at his home in Amman. He had told me that he had fled Iraq for Jordan in 1996, after becoming an opponent of Saddam’s regime. Once there, he had joined the Iraqi National Accord, which was at that time an exile organization dedicated to the overthrow of Saddam. The group, which was run by Allawi, had been under C.I.A. patronage since 1992. As the Sheikh told it, he and Allawi had helped prepare the way for American forces in Al Anbar province in the months before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March, 2003, by securing agreement from Iraqi military officers not to fight coalition troops. They had then travelled together into Iraq in April, 2003, after the fall of Baghdad, and Allawi had spent several days at the Sheikh’s house in Ramadi before continuing to Baghdad. Eight months later, however, Suleiman had fled to Jordan again, because of death threats from insurgents, who had accused him—not inaccurately, from the sound of it—of being an American collaborator. Suleiman’s image problem was similar to that of Allawi, who is often vilified by Iraqis, particularly Sunnis, as a Western puppet.

“The Americans are disloyal to their friends,” the Sheikh said. “I say this as someone who was considered an agent of theirs. They betrayed us by allowing Baghdad to be sacked, allowing the thieves to come in.” In spite of his friendship with Allawi, he said that he could not, as a Sunni leader, support the elections under the present circumstances. “You are from America,” he said. “If what happened in Falluja had happened in your city, could you have elections there?” (Suleiman was referring to the Marine assault on Falluja in November, which had displaced most of its two hundred and fifty thousand residents and destroyed large swaths of the city.) “If the election goes ahead as planned, it will be deficient. Iraq is like a house. You cannot build one room and leave the rest unfinished.”

The Sheikh said that he had come to the villa to ask Allawi to advocate a six-month postponement of the election—such a delay, he said, would help win over Sunnis. Allawi had been noncommittal, reminding him that the election timetable had been set by the United Nations, but saying, “We’ll see.” Suleiman sighed and wearily threw up his hands, meaning that he knew that the elections would go ahead as planned.

In our previous meeting, Suleiman had told me that, regardless of the election results, he hoped that Allawi would remain Iraq’s leader. “After thirty-five years of Saddam Hussein, Iraqis need severity with fairness,” he said. “We no longer respect laws. We need someone to stop us—a strong man, decisive, someone who can build a strong Army and rebuild the institutions of the state. In this phase, Allawi is the best man for the job.” With the elections a week closer, I wanted to know if Suleiman’s perspective had changed. But the Sheikh was distracted: his assistant was holding a cell phone and reading a text message to the Sheikh, who began questioning him with consternation. The assistant reread the message several times, glowering. Saffar, the senior aide, explained that the Sheikh had been unable to retrieve his text messages for some time, and had finally asked his assistant to do it for him. One message was a death threat, warning Sheikh Suleiman that if he didn’t break with Allawi within forty-eight hours he would be killed. The message added that an assassination team had been sent to Jordan to carry out the sentence if he failed to comply. The deadline had passed more than ten days earlier. Saffar smiled, seemingly unperturbed. Suleiman looked genuinely frightened. His eyes were wide and he shouted commands to his aide, who made a series of phone calls. I gathered that they were trying to reach the Jordanian intelligence service.

At this point, Allawi returned. Suleiman explained what had happened. Allawi grunted, but he turned to me, gestured to the terrace, and said, in a businesslike way, “Shall we continue?”

Allawi was anointed Iraq’s leader in June, in a formal ceremony with Paul Bremer III, the outgoing administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Since Allawi took office, Iraq has become unmoored by violence, and his efforts to restore security have been the central obsession of his leadership. “I want to see consolidated the rule of law,” he said after we went back outside. “I want to see Iraq unified and strong.” One of his first decisions was to announce a state of emergency, and, in the early weeks of his tenure, Allawi took pains to show that he was a man of decision and courage, habitually rushing—some would say recklessly—to the scenes of car-bomb explosions around Baghdad just after they had occurred. He used these occasions to denounce terrorism and defend the rule of law. (His security advisers eventually dissuaded him from this activity.)

More unnervingly, there have been persistent rumors that, a week or so before he took office, Allawi shot and killed several terrorist suspects being held prisoner at a Baghdad police station. When reporters asked him about the rumors, Allawi denied that he had shot anyone, but added that he would do “everything necessary” to protect Iraqis. I was in Baghdad at the time; although most Iraqis I spoke to believed the rumors, journalists and diplomats speculated that Allawi had spread them himself, in order to bolster his stern reputation.

In late June, however, I sat in on an interview, conducted by Paul McGeough, a reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald, of a man who claimed to have witnessed the executions. He described how Allawi had been taken to seven suspects, who were made to stand against a wall in a courtyard of the police station, their faces covered. After being told of their alleged crimes by a police official, Allawi had asked for a pistol, and then shot each prisoner in the head. Afterward, the witness said, Allawi had declared to those present, “This is how we must deal with the terrorists.” The witness said that he approved of Allawi’s act, adding that, in any case, the terrorists were better off dead, for they had been tortured for days.

In the ensuing months, the story has lingered, never having been either fully confirmed or convincingly denied. (Allawi did not address the incident with me.) During my visit to Jordan, a well-known former government minister told me that an American official had confirmed that the killings took place, saying to him, “What a mess we’re in—we got rid of one son of a bitch only to get another.”

Just as, in the past, Iraqis hid their true feelings about Saddam’s brutal tyranny by referring to him as “strict,” Iraqis today commonly describe Allawi as “tough.” It is an oddly polite term—a euphemism—that conceals varying degrees of fear, loathing, and admiration. An Iraqi friend of Allawi’s who has close links to Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy told me, “Iyad’s a thug, but a thug where he needs to be one. The Americans who set this up call him Saddam Lite.” Another old friend of Allawi’s, an Iraqi who now lives in Jordan, told me that, during a recent private reunion, Allawi had said that he was shocked, upon returning to Iraq after thirty years in exile, by the degree to which Saddam’s rule had debased Iraqi society. “He said Iraqis had become liars and cheats and murderers, and only respected brute force, and that was how he had to deal with them,” the friend recalled. In a fit of emotion, Allawi had exclaimed, “I will use brute force!”—three times, as if uttering a vow, punching one fist into the palm of his other hand.

Allawi has a temper, although he tries hard to conceal it. During the crisis in August in Najaf, he appeared in public with a bandaged hand, and there were rumors that he had smashed his fist in a bout of fury, during a critical moment of the standoff. At one point, I asked him about this story, and he laughed and acknowledged sheepishly that it was true—though he wouldn’t divulge the precise cause of the incident. “As we were facing the crisis, I was not getting a lot of information—just some to please me, some that was not accurate,” he said. “The information I received was wishful thinking rather than the reality. And that’s when I hit the table very hard and . . . I broke the hand, a bone in the wrist and another in the hand”—he showed me the fleshy part of his palm—“in two places.” He poked at it with his other hand. “But that is water under the bridge.” He looked up, and added, “You know, we are emotional people, and we believe in right and wrong.”

Allawi’s strongman persona has proved politically useful, helping him foster the illusion that he is protecting Iraqi “sovereignty”—even though Iraq is still an occupied country and its security remains a largely American project. In August, Allawi tried to negotiate an end to the uprising in Najaf, which was led by the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. When talks broke down, however, two thousand U.S. Marines and eighteen hundred Iraqi troops invaded, killing some two thousand insurgents and hundreds of civilians before a deal was finally brokered. Allawi had issued the formal order for the attack, and helicoptered into Najaf during the fighting, but the U.S. had been in charge.

One of his top priorities, Allawi told me, was the creation of a well-trained, well-equipped Iraqi Army large enough to replace U.S. troops, and he has set up a national directorate for domestic security and a police agency dedicated to counterterrorism. Still, a senior American official who has worked closely with him told me, “Allawi is tremendously frustrated that he doesn’t have a better military. He’s like a gardener without a trowel. We’re still building the factory to make the trowel.”

In November, Allawi assumed public responsibility for the decision to send U.S. Marines into Falluja, which resulted in thousands of deaths—although it did return the city to government control. But the Falluja assault did not end the Sunni insurgency; the rebellion has spread and maintained intensity. Since the Falluja operation, the northern city of Mosul—where twenty-two American and Iraqi soldiers were killed in their mess tent by a suicide bomber just before Christmas—has become a major new theatre of the war. In Baghdad, assassinations and suicide bombings have become routine occurrences. Certain districts are dominated by insurgents, who attack American military patrols, murder Iraqi policemen, and execute election officials.

On New Year’s Eve, the day after I met Allawi in Amman, he flew back unannounced to Baghdad, and, on a separate flight, so did I. Three days later, a suicide bomber raced his car toward the security cordon guarding Allawi’s residence in western Baghdad, just outside the Green Zone. Perimeter guards sprayed machine-gun fire at the bomber, causing him to crash, whereupon his car blew up. Allawi wasn’t at home at the time; four guards died in the explosion.

That day, there were numerous other assaults, including a suicide bombing near the airport which killed three Britons and one American, all security contractors. By evening, the news had spread that Allawi had telephoned President Bush to raise the possibility of postponing the elections. This news coincided with an alarmist public statement by his intelligence chief, General Muhammad Shahwani, that there were more insurgents in Iraq than there were American troops—some two hundred thousand, including sympathizers.

According to most of the people I spoke with, Allawi’s main concern was not that there might be violence at the polls but that he might lose power. Although he seemed certain to win a seat in the National Assembly, his party would likely be eclipsed by religious Shiite groups. I asked Allawi why he was running for office—was he angling for the Prime Minister job? He replied like a good politician, saying that he had put himself up as a candidate because friends and his own party had pressured him to do so. “Of course I want to be part of the process,” he said. Even if he lost on January 30th, he said firmly, “I’ll press on with whatever I believe is right for the country.”

"Iyad is a man whom the French would call ‘a man of the shadows,’” his cousin Ali Allawi told me in London last month. He, too, owns a home there, a gracious town house just off Kensington High Street. He described Allawi as enigmatic and elusive, qualities he attributed to Allawi’s early career as a Baathist, followed by his years spent working with Western intelligence agencies against Saddam. “He understands the Mukhabarat culture of intimidation,” Ali Allawi said, referring to the tactics of Iraq’s intelligence agency. He believed that this was why Iyad Allawi was chosen last April—by Robert Blackwill, President Bush’s special envoy to Iraq, and Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations’ envoy—to become interim Prime Minister. Ali Allawi was Iraq’s Defense Minister during the final months of the now defunct Iraqi Interim Governing Council. “At the time, the intention was to re-create the security state, and Iyad was the man, almost by default,” he said. “Iyad sees maintaining power primarily as an intelligence game. It’s a kind of mind-set.”

Iyad Allawi was born in 1945 into a Baghdad family with a lineage that goes back a thousand years. His father was an Iraqi Shiite and a doctor; his mother was a Lebanese Shiite, a school administrator from the patrician Osseiran family. And, in one of the characteristically byzantine twists of ancient families of the Middle East, he is related by marriage to another aristocratic Iraqi clan: the Chalabis. Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, who has been Allawi’s political rival for years, is his second cousin. (Chalabi is also the uncle of Ali Allawi.) Chalabi and Iyad Allawi have been involved in bitter disputes over the years, but they have maintained an outward decorum. Tamara Daghestani, an Iraqi who is friends with both men, said, “Iyad and Ahmad are polite to each other. There is rivalry, yes, but they do it in gentlemanly fashion. I have never heard either of them talk badly about the other.”

Allawi grew up in Adhamiyah, a wealthy, mostly Sunni district of northwestern Baghdad—just across the Tigris from Kadhimiyah, where the Chalabis lived—and attended one of the best schools in Iraq, the Jesuit-run Baghdad College. Among the other students were Ahmad Chalabi and Adel Abdul Mahdi, the current Iraqi Finance Minister. As children, during the early fifties, the Allawis and the Chalabis were members of a cosmopolitan élite—the descendants of well-to-do Iraqis who had been government ministers and members of parliament in the waning years of the British-installed Hashemite monarchy. During summer holidays, Allawi travelled with his family to Lebanon and Europe.

In 1958, a bloody revolution led by the military toppled the monarchy and upended the privileged lives of the Allawi and Chalabi families. Some older relatives involved in politics were attacked by mobs, who saw them as members of the hated old “plutocracy.” Ali Allawi and most of his cousins were sent abroad to study; Ali went to a boarding school in England. The Chalabis moved to Lebanon in 1959. Ali Allawi and Ahmad Chalabi attended M.I.T., and both men eventually went into international banking and, in the mid-seventies, entered the world of Iraqi exile politics.

Iyad Allawi, meanwhile, had been travelling in an entirely different political and social orbit. His family had stayed on in Iraq, and he had become deeply involved with the Baath Party, which he joined at the age of twelve. One of his relatives told me, “The fact that Iyad became a Baathist when he did was not all that unusual for an Iraqi boy of his age and class. In those days, you were either a Communist or a Baathist.” The Baathists opposed the rule of President Abdul Karim Qassem, whose government was seen as Communist-influenced. “He became a street fighter, an organizer,” the relative recalled. “He kept getting arrested, but without suffering too many consequences, because of his family, their influence and connections.”

As a young man, Iyad Allawi studied medicine at Baghdad University; he also remained deeply involved in Baathist politics. Muhammad Sadiq al-Badri, an Iraqi Sunni who is a pharmacist by training—and who managed one of Iraq’s state-owned pharmaceutical factories during Saddam’s rule—told me that he met Allawi in 1960, upon joining the Party. Later, Allawi became his Party boss. “He was very quiet, but seemed strong,” Badri recalled. “He was inflexible, tough, and didn’t like to discuss things too much. If he gave orders, we had to carry them out. Afterward, we could discuss, but not before.” Badri said that under Allawi he had been involved in many fights with Communists at the university.

In 1963, the Baathists staged a coup against Qassem. Afterward, thousands of Communists were killed by supporters of the coup. I spoke with several Iraqis who alleged that Allawi was involved in the Baathist interrogation of Communists during those bloody days. One Iraqi told me that he had been a Communist in his youth and had been rounded up in the 1963 purge. He said that Allawi had been present while he was tortured, although, after more than forty years, he could not remember if Allawi had personally taken part in his mistreatment. He said that he had been beaten while being hung by his arms from a ceiling hook; by the time he was let down, his shoulders were dislocated.

Allawi denied that he had been involved in torture and killing. “In 1963, I was just a secondary student and I am known to have stood against the Investigation Committee and the National Guard of the Baath Party—those who killed the Communists—and later, when the Baath Party split, I joined the smaller group that opposed the atrocities of 1963,” he said.

After the coup, an Army officer, Abdel Salaam Aref—the head of a coalition of competing factions, including the Baathists—seized power. By the end of the year, the Baathists had been purged. Around this time, Allawi became friendly with Saddam, and he helped facilitate his brutal rise. The two conspired against the government and were thrown in jail together. Allawi’s family bailed him out, and Saddam escaped in 1966. Allawi and Saddam immediately resumed their plotting.

In July, 1968, the Baathists forcibly regained power. Allawi played a role in this coup: following his party’s orders, the day after his mother’s funeral he hurried back from Beirut to help seize Baghdad’s main radio station. The new regime was led by Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, who became Iraq’s new President, and Saddam Hussein, his distant cousin, who quickly emerged as the dominant force. In 1979, Saddam displaced his relative and took over.

During my conversation with Allawi in Amman, he acknowledged his sense of responsibility for this calamitous period of Iraqi history and for the bloody years that followed. It was this feeling of responsibility, he said, that eventually spurred him to fight against Saddam for so many years. Allawi told me that it was not until a few days after the 1968 coup, when a prominent Baghdad lawyer was murdered by killers linked to Saddam, that he had a change of heart. As Saddam consolidated his authority, Allawi said, his misgivings about him deepened. In 1971, while on a visit to Lebanon, he made his break. Friends in Baghdad called Allawi to tell him that Saddam was conducting a purge of the regime; they warned him not to return to Iraq. Allawi decided to move to London and continue his medical studies. But, as is so often the case, Allawi’s account of what happened next does not match the recollections of others.

The most widely shared account of Allawi’s first years in London is that he was still working for the Iraqi Baath Party, and for Saddam, as the head of a surveillance network that monitored the sizable Iraqi émigré and student communities in Europe. “When Allawi went to London, he was in charge of the Baath Party for the United Kingdom,” Muhammad Sadiq al-Badri said. “Later, he was in charge of the Mukhabarat who worked out of the Embassy. Their job was to watch over the Iraqi students, and he knew many of them. They wanted to make sure they maintained their loyalty to the Party.”

Badri also said that Allawi fell out with Saddam after Saddam heard that Allawi had come into contact with M.I.6, the British intelligence agency. “Saddam invited him to come back to Baghdad, he refused to go, and he retired from the Baath Party,” Badri said. Allawi told me that he did not begin working with British intelligence until 1990, but there is little doubt that the alliance began many years before that. Both sides profited from the relationship. For the British, Allawi was a powerful Iraqi dissident whose knowledge and contacts offered a potential means of future influence there. For Allawi, the relationship with M.I.6 assured him of continued sanctuary in Britain and provided funds for him to build his own political operation while living in exile.

Allawi offered a long, abstruse explanation of his activities in London. He told me that once he moved there he had had nothing more to do with the Iraqi Baath Party, or with Saddam. He said that he had been attached not to the Iraqi Baath Party but to the “global” Baathist movement, serving as the chairman of the Western European branch of the Pan Arab Baath Party. In 1975, he quit that group as well, he said, having decided that Saddam was exerting too much control over it.

I told Allawi that many of the people I spoke to were nevertheless under the impression that he had represented the Iraqi Baath Party or the Mukhabarat during his first years in England. “No, no,” he protested. “First of all, I never worked as a government official, never ever. Neither as a Mukhabarat nor anything else. Second, there was not anything called Mukhabarat when I left Iraq.” He explained that the organization known by that name had come into existence only in 1973—a rather technical argument, given that mukhabarat is an Arab word that means “intelligence.” He added that when a precursor agency to the Mukhabarat was created he had argued against it at a Party meeting. Allawi later said that this meeting was the last time he saw Saddam.

“I departed from the ideology of the Baath Party in 1971,” Allawi said. “There were two issues which were very dangerous: one was élitism, the second was secret thinking and secret organizational structures. And I stood against those two. I thought this was a thing of the past, and mimics old Communism. This is one reason I had rejected all the offers that were put in front of me to be a member of the government. This went on from 1969 until I left Iraq. I was offered an ambassadorial post while I was still a medical student! I was offered to become the Ambassador to Lebanon. I was offered ministerial posts. I rejected all this, because by then I was very clear in my mind I could not really be working within the Baath Party, because of the growing influence of the Saddam axis.”

Around this time, Allawi had obtained a master’s degree in epidemiology at University College London and had nearly completed his doctoral thesis, in rheumatology, at Guy’s Hospital. He had begun to meet regularly with other exiles, but they had not yet formed an opposition group. Nonetheless, Saddam was clearly worried about their activities. “Saddam really started believing that we were forming a group to overthrow the regime,” Allawi said. Beginning in 1975, several of Allawi’s close friends were assassinated by hit men presumed to have been dispatched by Saddam. One was killed in Beirut; another was killed shortly after returning, against Allawi’s advice, to Baghdad. I asked Allawi why he thought that Saddam had not immediately targeted him for death. He explained that for years Saddam had tried to lure him back to the Party, sending envoys to London for that purpose. He had rejected those overtures.

In 1978, someone finally came after him. One night, Allawi and his wife, Athour, were asleep in their home in suburban London when two men, one of them wielding an axe, broke in and attacked. “I was hit in the head and the chest and the leg,” he recalled. “The bones in my leg were all sticking out— there was blood everywhere. My wife became badly injured in the attack also, trying to defend me.” During a struggle, Allawi wrested the axe from his attacker, who fled, along with the other intruder. Allawi’s voice grew low and pained, and he mentioned that the incident had caused his wife to become mentally disturbed. (In 1981, he divorced Athour; she died last year, of cancer. Allawi married his second wife, Thana, in 1987.)

Allawi spent nearly a year in the hospital recovering from the attack, which he believes was ordered by Saddam. He spent much of his convalescence questioning his involvement in politics. “When I was lying in the hospital, I thought to myself, Is it worth it, to continue and to fight Saddam, or is it not?” he said. “And I decided that ultimately my destiny and my country and whatever I stand for required me to fight. On the day I left the hospital, a Thursday, I went to see some of my friends, and I told them, ‘We have to consolidate now and we have to work actively to overthrow the regime.’”

In the late seventies, Allawi kept a low profile. He was employed as a part-time consultant with the United Nations Development Program, which was conducting medical training programs in developing countries. He went on missions to Colombia and Bangladesh, among other places.

With intentional vagueness, Allawi said that he became involved in “business” in Yemen and the Persian Gulf region in 1982. Ali Allawi referred to this period as his cousin’s time of “hibernation,” saying that he never really knew what Iyad was up to. In Iraqi political circles, however, the prevailing wisdom is that Iyad Allawi was working closely with M.I.6. An Iraqi political insider who has known Allawi for years told me, “The Brits set him up with oil deals in Yemen to allow him to make money.”

Warren Marik, a former case officer with the C.I.A. who provided support to Iraqi exile groups, told me that Allawi had been an M.I.6 asset until the British passed him on to the Americans, in the early nineties. “We didn’t know him until the Brits offered him to us,” Marik said. “They said, ‘He was a Baathist guy until he walked in to us.’” Marik paused to explain: “‘Walked in’ means that he came over to them, defected.” Marik said that he had heard rumors that Allawi had served as an assassin for Saddam in Europe, killing wayward Baathists and traitors, before his own defection, but said, “I don’t believe he was a hit man. I do believe he was from the Baathist intelligence directorate.”

After Saddam’s defeat in the Gulf War, in 1991, Allawi adopted a more public role, as the leader of a new organization, the Iraqi National Accord. Since then, Allawi said, “I’ve devoted all my time to Iraq.” The I.N.A.’s goal was to topple Saddam by fomenting a coup led by disenfranchised Baathists and military officers. Meanwhile, his cousin Ahmad Chalabi had created a rival organization, the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C.—also funded by the C.I.A., and with a similar agenda. But Chalabi’s strategy was different: a virulent anti-Baathist, he envisaged a popular uprising against Saddam based in northern Iraq, where he had cultivated contacts among Kurdish guerrillas.

In 1995, Chalabi’s plan was approved by the C.I.A., and he assembled thousands of fighters, most of them Kurds, in northern Iraq. The plot was a disaster. Saddam sent an armored force that slaughtered Chalabi’s soldiers by the hundreds. Afterward, the C.I.A. withdrew its funding from Chalabi.

Allawi’s competing plan was set into motion in 1996, with White House approval and C.I.A. funding. (Khaled Shamari, now a business consultant in Baghdad, said that, in the mid-nineties, Allawi told him that the I.N.A. had received twenty-six million dollars from the United States.) Allawi claimed that he had secured contact with a cabal of Iraqi Army officers who were supposedly loyal to him. But someone apparently betrayed him. By June, Saddam had found out about the scheme and unleashed a brutal witch hunt within the military. Arrests, torture, and executions followed, and hundreds died. It was the end of the Clinton Administration’s attempts to overthrow Saddam.

“I have a gripe with Allawi for a couple of reasons,” Marik said. “First, Allawi started telling people, ‘Chalabi is no longer the head guy with the Americans—it’s us.’” Marik laughed in an exasperated way. “It was a good move, I guess, for a politician, but it didn’t do much to unify the opposition. Second, he didn’t do very well with this coup attempt of his, did he?” He went on, “Allawi didn’t pull off the zipless coup he was asked to do. So what had he achieved? Maybe I’m missing something, but I sure don’t see much.”

For the rest of the nineteen-nineties, while Saddam remained in power, Chalabi and Allawi stayed in exile, supplying intelligence from their agents inside Iraq to the American and British governments and waiting for something to change. Soon after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration began planning a war against Iraq. Chalabi and Allawi resurfaced as leading figures of the suddenly revitalized Iraqi opposition. Their intelligence helped fuel the Bush and Blair governments’ cases against Saddam in the prelude to the war. Much of that information was flawed. Indeed, a now discredited claim made by the British government and cited by President Bush—that Saddam could deploy weapons of mass destruction within forty-five minutes—originated from the I.N.A. The incident caused a furor in Britain. An Allawi spokesman, Nick Theros, later explained that the I.N.A. had heard this claim from a single source and passed it on to M.I.6 “in good faith.”

Unlike Chalabi, who became infamous in America for having planted dubious stories about Saddam’s weapons programs, Allawi somehow emerged relatively unscathed from the W.M.D.-intelligence fallout. Last spring, Chalabi’s political fortunes declined further, after he was accused of sharing American intelligence secrets with Iran. U.S. troops raided his home in Baghdad and the Pentagon severed ties with him. A few weeks later, Allawi became interim Prime Minister.

His appointment was a surprise. Allawi had kept an extremely low profile during the first year of the occupation, and his well-known links to U.S. and British intelligence had damaged his reputation among Iraqis. Yet he had long-standing ties to U.S. policymakers, who trusted him. According to an American official in Baghdad who was privy to the selection process, Allawi was seen as the candidate with the fewest liabilities. “There weren’t that many candidates, to be frank,” the official recalled. “And it was pretty clear it had to be a Shiite.” He explained that the Americans felt uncomfortable with the two other leading contenders—Shiite politicians who represented religious parties affiliated with Iran. In the end, Allawi’s nomination was clinched when the members of the Iraqi Interim Governing Council unanimously endorsed him. Allawi’s sudden rise from obscurity suggested an impressive degree of political instinct, not least in knowing how and when to present himself as a useful man.

The American official in Iraq who has worked closely with Allawi during the past year said that he wasn’t surprised by Allawi’s success. “Allawi plays his cards close to his chest, but, after all, he’s a former Baathist conspirator—which is also why it’s no surprise that he’s no liberal democrat,” he said. He laughed, then added, “He’s aware that we are essential to the process. He’s got good political instincts. I like him.”

Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. field officer in the Middle East, suggested that much of Allawi’s appeal to the Americans comes down to a matter of personality. “I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like Allawi,” he said. “He’s accommodating, a pragmatist. He’s someone who challenges the Americans on their own terms, but not abrasively.”

The morning after the attack on Allawi’s residence, I had a breakfast meeting with Adel Abdul Mahdi, the Finance Minister. An hour earlier, another huge explosion had echoed across the city (it turned out to have been a truck bomb, which killed ten people). Mahdi is a veteran Shiite politician who has undergone a bewildering series of transformations. A Baathist in his youth, he later converted to Maoism, and is now a member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of Iraq’s main Shiite religious parties. Mahdi is a candidate in the January 30th elections. He is seeking a seat in the National Assembly as a representative of the United Iraqi Alliance, which consists of a broad coalition of Shiite parties and has been blessed by the country’s most influential spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Unable to broker an alliance with the religious Shiites, Allawi is running on a separate slate, a coalition of the I.N.A. and a motley group of Sunni and Shiite followers.

Although Mahdi and Allawi are currently political rivals, Mahdi was a close friend of Allawi’s during his early Baathist days, and told me that he still regarded him as a friend and as a “good man.” We talked about recent events, including Allawi’s recent conversation with President Bush. Mahdi said that he interpreted Allawi’s phone call to Bush as a bid to buy more time to build his own party’s strength. “Allawi started out strong, but he has achieved less than he was originally thought capable of,” Mahdi said, explaining that he was speaking both about Allawi’s performance as interim Prime Minister and about his political candidacy. “His government has achieved some things in the security arena. When he took office, both Najaf and Falluja were out of control. Now they are under the government’s control. But most people still live in an insecure situation.”

Mahdi said that Allawi’s main weakness was his inability to broker alliances. For the elections, he said, Allawi should have forged “a national ticket” that would have united their two coalitions. Allawi, Mahdi suggested, was a man more accustomed to conspiracy than to political horse-trading. Instead of building coalitions, Mahdi said with disapproval, Allawi had focussed on helping former Baathists.

Soon after Saddam’s overthrow, the Coalition Provisional Authority had banned Party members and military officers from holding government positions. This policy was meant to purify Iraq’s political sphere, but it also had the effect of fuelling the insurgency—by creating a large cohort of embittered, unemployed men. Upon taking office, Allawi began reversing the ban. For example, he made plans to rehire some of Iraq’s former border guards. Mahdi called such efforts “re-Baathification,” and said of Allawi, “Even when he formed the I.N.A., I cannot remember anyone in it who was not a Baathist. Until the late nineteen-eighties, Allawi was still hoping to encourage the Baath Party to overthrow Saddam Hussein. . . . Some people, even some Americans, think they can bring an end to the insurgency by giving some Baathists jobs. But you need a government which is looking to the future, not made up by those who are nostalgic. We need to be clear: this is a major mistake in security policy.”

An aide came into the room and handed Mahdi a yellow Post-it note with something scribbled on it. He read it and said matter-of-factly, “The mayor of Baghdad has just been assassinated. His name was Ali al-Haidari.” He raised his eyebrows slightly, and said, “Another Shia.”

Mahdi resumed our conversation. He was adamant that the elections go ahead as scheduled. The insurgents, he said, “are trying to stop them by any means—assassinations and bombings and so forth—but still the people will be there, and this is a powerful message.”

In the first week of January, I went to see Allawi at his official Baghdad residence. Guards wearing black balaclavas and wielding Kalashnikovs stood at the entrance to the road leading to his home. While the guards waited for authorization to let me through, they made my driver pull over and park. About fifteen feet away, I saw a large black splotch on the road and some skid marks next to it—the spot where the car bomber had blown himself up four days earlier.

Eventually, we were allowed through, and as policemen escorted us past concrete barriers I recognized the road as a former major boulevard that ran past Zawra Park. A neglected Ferris wheel and a number of carrousels and swings and slides stood behind the fences; the grass was yellow and overgrown. The houses on the other side of the street were palatial, but the glass in most of the windows had been blown out, no doubt by the car-bomb explosion. We passed a five-story office block with a banner that read, in English and Arabic, “Iraqi National Accord,” and a little farther on we came to another roadblock.

After being frisked by some Iraqi sentries, I was shown through the gates, past more guards, and into a pleasant walled garden, where Allawi was sitting in the sun in a plastic chair. He was wearing blue pants and an olive-green corduroy shirt. His face looked tired but his eyes were alert. He asked me if I wanted coffee or tea, and called out our orders to two Asian maids. They darted across the lawn into the residence, a modern brick building. Helicopters buzzed, and some gunshots cracked in the distance.

I told him I had heard him describe his job as “horrible.” “It’s very tiring,” he conceded. “The responsibility is huge, and it’s a very difficult task, rebuilding our institutions almost from scratch.” Moreover, since becoming Prime Minister he had been able to see his family only occasionally, on short visits like the one he had made to London over Christmas. When he was a member of the Interim Governing Council—when Iraq was still under the Coalition Provisional Authority—he had not considered himself such an obvious target, and his family had moved to Amman, to be nearby. “When I became Prime Minister, it seemed better for them to go back to London,” he explained. He brightened, and nodded toward the house: “I have one of my daughters here with me now. She is on her school break, but has to go back soon.” He told me that he had two daughters, aged sixteen and fifteen, and an eight-year-old son, all from his second marriage.

I asked Allawi about his reputation as a “tough guy.” He nodded. “There are many reasons for it,” he said. “When I was young, I participated in various political events, including the coup of 1968. I also resisted the regime very fiercely, even when they tried to kill me. And I always talk about needing a powerful Iraq, with a strong Army—not to threaten our neighbors but to defend ourself. My crusade is to bring back our Army, restore its capability, and rebuild our intelligence capability.” Speaking about his visits to Najaf during the fighting there last summer, he boasted, “I don’t chicken out in the face of threats.”

In conversation, Allawi is beguilingly amiable and polite. He quickly deflects conversations from topics he finds uncomfortable, and he avoids confrontation, expressing agreement whenever he finds it possible to do so. “What’s nice about Allawi?” an Iraqi critical of him once asked me rhetorically, after excoriating him as untrustworthy and deceitful. “Talking to him is nice.”

Allawi spoke in enthusiastic detail about his plans to build up Iraq’s Army. He said that he was merging the newly formed Iraqi National Guard with the Army being trained by the Americans. And Iraq’s borders would soon be more secure, he claimed, thanks to his decision to call back some of the guards who had been ousted by Paul Bremer’s de-Baathification order. He emphasized that the border guards he was rehiring were the least politically involved branch of Saddam’s military—“where he used to send his outcasts.”

Adel Abdul Mahdi and other critics of “re-Baathification” had told me that Allawi had rehired many officers and intelligence agents who were alleged to have committed atrocities under Saddam. “I challenge you to find, in the people around me, one person who is an ideological Baathist or who has blood on his hands,” Allawi said tersely. He spoke of his intelligence chief, General Shahwani, a former Baathist who had joined the I.N.A. in the mid-nineties. After the group’s failed attempt to foment a coup, Allawi reminded me, Shahwani’s three sons had been executed by Saddam. Allawi said that he took umbrage at any aspersions cast on a man who had paid such a high price for opposing Saddam.

Allawi said that even before the war, when he had first learned that de-Baathification was being considered for Iraq, he had argued strongly against it. The program, he said, should have been called “de-Saddamization”—and limited to Saddam’s loyalists and cronies—because, in his opinion, most Iraqis who were members of the Baath Party during the Saddam years had merely used it as a “vehicle to live,” a means of obtaining and keeping their jobs and other state perks.

Baathism, he said, was “finished” as an ideology. “Just like Marxism-Leninism is finished. Their time has gone.” He went on, “As for the rest of it—élitism and secrecy and the use of force—there is no room for these things anymore. Now is the time for democracy and the rule of law.”

When we discussed the torture and humiliation of detainees by Americans at Abu Ghraib prison, Allawi chose his words carefully. “Well, you know, it happens in war, this kind of thing,” he said. “It should not, but it does. I think those responsible should be brought to justice, of course, but, you know, you can understand, under the stress of war, and in the absence of judicial processes, such events can occur. We must restore the judicial institutions so that these kinds of things don’t happen. But we are now in the middle of war, we are fighting terrorism. Their minds are closed, and they are determined to cause death and destruction—not just here in Iraq but across the globe. So to draw the line on interrogating people . . . you fall into mistakes. You hold a group of suspects, you take them for investigation. Maybe some are guilty and some are innocent. In this ugly war, brought by the evil ones, innocents will always suffer.”

He referred opaquely to a recent visit with an Iraqi official who, he implied, had custody of some terrorist suspects. “I saw that he had pain in his face,” he recalled. “And I could see that he was being too aggressive toward the detainees. So I asked him to be calm—and, in fact, I arranged for him to go on leave, to take a break. Human emotions, you know, sometimes you can’t control.” He said that this was why he had resisted visiting Saddam in prison. “I might want to call him a coward, abuse him, even.”

I asked him if he had ever killed anyone.

“No,” he replied. “Never.”

Had he ever tortured anyone or been present when people were tortured?

“No.” Allawi shook his head vigorously. A moment later, he added, “But to kill in self-defense, yes. I’ve issued orders to my police to kill terrorists when they are unable to take them otherwise.” He said that he had always opposed torture and killing, and that it was one of the things that had alienated him from Saddam. “Torture is a sign of weakness rather than strength,” Allawi said. “Even going to see Saddam, for example, now—I could do it, as others have done, but I haven’t. I haven’t wanted to because I don’t want to use my position of power to further humiliate him.” He made clear that he had no sympathy for Saddam. “If he had respected himself or surrendered, I might, but the way he hid himself after destroying the country, and even after his sons were killed—this really confirmed to me that this man is only interested in himself, a coward.”

Allawi discussed the common perception among Iraqis that he is an outsider, tied to Western intelligence interests. “I am my own man,” he said. “I was one of the last members of the opposition to make links with the United States.” He stressed that even after he had received American backing he had always spoken his mind. “I was the only one who spoke out and wrote against de-Baathification, for instance, even before the war,” he said. When he learned that the postwar disbandment of Iraq’s Army was being discussed, he added, he had attacked the idea in meetings with political leaders in the United States and neighboring countries such as Turkey. “I spoke out,” he said. “I always thought if there was a vacuum it would be dangerous.”

On Saturday, January 8th, Allawi was to meet with a group of Sunni sheikhs in the Green Zone and invited me to join him. He told me it was part of his “Sunni outreach” effort—an attempt to placate leaders from the Iraqi community most hostile to the U.S. occupation. The program was also a savvy political gesture. By presenting himself to the Sunnis as a figure of consensus as well as a man of resolve, he was positioning himself as a mainstream politician—and a safe choice for Prime Minister.

That afternoon, one of Allawi’s aides picked me up in a car a few blocks from his residence. A hundred or more sheikhs were climbing into a small fleet of minibuses nearby, many of them dressed in tribal finery—embroidered robes and head scarves. Led by several S.U.V.s filled with security men—among them was Allawi’s American bodyguard, whom I had last seen in Amman—we proceeded in a convoy down the road. Within a few hundred feet we came to a high walled gate guarded by American soldiers; we were entering the Green Zone by the back door. “This is the V.I.P. entrance,” Allawi’s man remarked. We drove past the former Baath Party Congress headquarters and came to a roadblock manned by American soldiers. After we were allowed past, one of the soldiers on the road quipped loudly to a friend, “It’s the Baath Party coming through!” Allawi’s man laughed.

The convoy arrived at a ten-story building that functions as the official headquarters of the Iraqi Interim Government. Nepalese Ghurkas guarded the perimeter, and several Americans, some in uniform and some in civilian clothes, stood around the entrance. One American asked Allawi’s deputy security adviser if the sheikhs should be subjected to a body search. “No, it is all right. They are our guests,” the adviser said. Looking a little uncertain, the American backed off.

We filed into a conference room inside the building and took seats that had been set up in rows in front of several ornate couches. In the front row sat a trio of senior Sunni clerics wearing fezzes wrapped in turban cloth. Others wore black-and-white checked kaffiyehs; a man in front of me had on a fine camel-hair robe. About a third of the guests wore Western suits, and most of the older men had dyed their hair and their mustaches black, following Iraqi custom. After several minutes, Allawi entered, and there was a friendly murmur of greeting. Allawi smiled. He was wearing a tailored English blazer. After greeting the assemblage, he sat down on one of the couches, with his public-security minister, Qassem Daud, nearby. Daud accompanies Allawi at most of his public appearances, and although he rarely says anything, he is regarded as Allawi’s right-hand man.

The first to speak was Dr. Adnan Muhammad Salman, an eighty-year-old senior Sunni cleric and the oldest man in the room. Allawi was deferential to him; I was told that he was the Iraqi in charge of organizing the annual hajj, a symbolically important role in Muslim religious circles. The old man said that he thought the moqawama—“the resistance,” which is the term that many Sunnis use for the insurgents in Iraq—was justified. He added that he thought “criminals,” and not the moqawama, were responsible for the more notorious kidnappings. He complained about the lack of security in Iraq, and the inadequate electricity supply—“It is worse than ever today”—and asked for a postponement of the elections. When Salman was finished, he apologized for speaking so bluntly, and asked Allawi not to be angry with him. Allawi cheerfully demurred.

Another man spoke, introducing himself as a member of the council for the northern governorate of Salahuddin, which encompasses Saddam’s home town of Tikrit. “Iraqis have been through four wars” in the past twenty-five years, he began, “and their hearts are wounded. People are sad and angry and living in darkness, and cannot see the light. . . . The government needs to explain better what it’s doing and where it’s going. People need jobs.” He argued that it was unfair that the oil pipeline that bisected his province was being protected by American and European security companies, and asked, “Couldn’t this be done by Iraqis?” He told Allawi that the people in his area were split over the election issue: there were those who thought it would be useful and those who thought it wouldn’t. He concluded by saying, “Fuck the occupation!”

The sheikhs in the audience laughed, but Allawi did not join them. He led the way into an adjacent dining room, where a table was set for lunch. Over a meal of rice, mutton, hummus, and olives, I talked with a sheikh from Falluja who, when I asked him how things were in his city, told me, “It’s been ruined.” His and his brother’s homes had been destroyed, he said. There was a lot of tension between residents and the American and Iraqi soldiers. He had disagreed with Allawi’s decision to order the assault on Falluja in November, but when I asked him what he thought of Allawi he said, “He’s a good man,” as if he assumed that this was what I wanted to hear. He evaded my attempts to find out if he planned to vote for Allawi, but finally said, “We see only the outside of Allawi. We’ve met with him many times, but we don’t know what’s in his heart, and we don’t know what’s behind his back.” He held up his left hand, and I saw that he was missing three fingers. “I lost these fingers and three brothers fighting in the Iran-Iraq War,” he said. “With all of that, I never felt afraid. But I do now. We are scared about the future.”

After lunch, the sheikhs returned to the conference room. Suddenly, the main door opened and John Dimitri Negroponte, the American Ambassador to Iraq, walked in, followed by five U.S. senators—Majority Leader Bill Frist, of Tennessee; Majority Whip Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky; Norm Coleman, of Minnesota; Mike DeWine, of Ohio; and Mary Landrieu, of Louisiana, who was the only Democrat in the group and the only woman in the room. Allawi greeted them, introduced them, and seated Landrieu on his right and Frist on his left, on the main couch facing the sheikhs. Speaking in English, Allawi told the senators that the sheikhs were “from the Sunni areas.” Switching back to Arabic, Allawi encouraged the sheikhs to stand up and express their views. Several did so, with a couple of Allawi’s aides, at a crackly microphone, improvising as simultaneous translators.

The first man to speak complained about the behavior of American military troops, noting their tendency to make arbitrary arrests, and said, “Iraqis are now afraid when they hear the word ‘American.’” He asked for help in creating jobs, explaining that unemployed men were easy recruits for terrorists. The senators listened attentively—Frist gave the impression of being rapt; Landrieu’s face was frozen in a smile—although at times they appeared confounded by the mangled translations. Another speaker, who identified himself as a Kurd from Mosul, fulminated briefly and disjointedly about the Iranian threat against Iraq. The third speaker inspired laughter among his fellow-sheikhs when he broke into English, proclaiming, “We don’t want occupation—we want liberation.” The senators smiled politely. Just then, a violent shudder from a nearby explosion caused the windows of the room to rattle for a long moment, as in an earthquake.

Allawi seemed to feel that the senators had heard enough. He invited Bill Frist to address the crowd. The Senator introduced himself and his four companions as “the representatives of two hundred and seventy million Americans,” and then compared the proceedings he had just witnessed with the discourse of the U.S. Senate, where every day he and other senators “exchanged opinions” and “shared emotions.”

He went on, “The timing of the election is an Iraqi decision. And we are here to support you. We do think, although it is your decision, that the timing of the January 30th election is important. We know it may not be perfect—ours aren’t—and that is a part of democracy and freedom. But we see these elections as an important first step in that process, and one that will lead to a greater American commitment to Iraq’s development and to the education and opportunities and jobs you want.” When he finished, twenty or thirty of the sheikhs clapped perfunctorily. Allawi rose to his feet and guided the senators out of the room.

He returned a few minutes later and called for all the representatives from Mosul to join him for a talk behind closed doors. With upward of three million people, Mosul is Iraq’s second-largest city, and ever since the November assault on Falluja it has become the new epicenter of the insurgency. All week long, there had been rumors about plans for a large-scale American military assault on the city, and I gathered that this was the reason for the special conclave. About twenty men followed Allawi into the dining room, which had been transformed into a conference room. Allawi sat at the head of a long U-shaped table draped with yellow cloth. Qassem Daud, as always, sat beside him. One of Allawi’s senior aides expressed concerned about my presence, but Allawi indicated that I could stay.

A man began talking forcefully to Allawi about how the resistance movement in Mosul was somewhat legitimate, since it was opposing the occupation. He promised that the violence would stop if the Americans would only leave. Allawi interrupted him with a challenge: “Why do you say ‘occupation’? Who is the occupation? What will happen if the Americans leave? If they do, and the terrorists take over, you will be the first to call for Bush—for Bush’s mother—to rescue you!” He chuckled.

Another man began arguing with Allawi. “The resistance has many supporters in Mosul,” he said. He said that the real problem in Mosul was the power of the Kurds. “In Mosul we would prefer any forces, Americans or British—anybody but the Kurds. The occupation in Mosul is Kurdish.”

Allawi replied, “We have only a couple of choices. The first is to leave things the way they are, in trouble—this is not a good choice. The second choice is that the people of Mosul can behave well with themselves and one another, and there can be security and stability. I used to fight for freedom and independence. I knew what I was fighting for, what it was that I wanted. What do you want? Is it Saddam you want back? Saddam likes this fighting that is occurring. As for the Americans, this is the reality: we can’t protect ourselves right now because we are weak, so the Americans are here to protect us. Ten per cent of the people are poisoning life for everyone there, and we want to cut out the poison. We don’t want to use force, but we can’t allow the situation to continue. I have many friends in Mosul, clean people, such as yourselves. Is it government jobs that people there want? If so, I am ready to provide them.”

Another sheikh began speaking. He held a plastic folder that he explained was full of papers signed by former military and intelligence people who were out of jobs and who, in his words, “felt abandoned.” Allawi pointed to the folder and, smiling, said, “So are you going to give that to me or is it an intelligence file?” He laughed, and so did the men from Mosul. The sheikh said he would give him a copy. “Good,” Allawi said, looking satisfied. The sheikh also looked pleased, as if the two of them had just struck a mutually beneficial deal, and he said, “There is another very important reason to keep a lid on things in Mosul, which is that many people, ex-intelligence and ex-military, will come over to you if you give them a job.” Allawi nodded.

“Why did you bring us here—to eat and drink, or to come up with solutions?” another man asked. “I will give you the solution for Mosul: withdraw the Americans.”

“How can I?” Allawi replied.

“Tell the Americans to withdraw and I promise you I will get all the tribal leaders to divide up the city by sections and control the place. I promise you there will be no more trouble.”

Allawi smiled, but did not reply. Another sheikh, who was sitting closer to Allawi, said, in a tone of friendly deprecation, “If you withdraw the Americans, you’ll find no one to control the city.”

Everyone laughed, except the sheikh he was addressing. Allawi replied, banteringly, “O.K., bring the sheikhs to me and I’ll tell the Americans to withdraw.” He chuckled again. The men from Mosul laughed. Allawi rose to his feet, and so did everyone else. The meeting was over.

Several days after Allawi’s meeting with the Sunni sheikhs, Ambassador Negroponte met with me in his office in Saddam’s old Republican Palace, inside the Green Zone. Negroponte’s tenure in Iraq, which began upon the departure of Paul Bremer, last June, had coincided with the premiership of Allawi. When Iraqi sovereignty was transferred to Allawi, the Coalition Provisional Authority was formally replaced by the U.S. Embassy. Unlike Bremer, who was a ubiquitous, assertive presence in Iraq during his fourteen months as C.P.A. administrator, Negroponte has been unobtrusive, allowing Allawi to become the public face of the occupation.

Negroponte praised Allawi’s performance in office. “All the institutions of the state were either destroyed or crumbled in the wake of the invasion, and then the C.P.A. took over,” he said. “But there wasn’t much to work with when he took over. He’s had to build a government. He’s begun the process of building a new Iraqi Army, but it’s a lot slower than he’d like. He’s done much to restore Iraq’s credibility with its neighbors, and he’s conducted pretty effective diplomacy.” He went on, “He thinks a lot about democracy. But I’ve noticed that there’s a curious blend between him being anti-Saddam and the belief that Iraqis need to be ruled with a strong hand. He really wants that strong Army. He thinks that if he’d had a real Army the Falluja uprising would never have taken place. He could’ve sent in tanks to put it down.”

Although Allawi’s tenure would officially end on January 30th, he would remain a central figure in Iraqi politics, Negroponte said. “I think that in the last six months he’s made a transition from revolutionary exile to national politician. I certainly think that, and I think that’s the way he’s viewed by Iraqis, too,” he added. “He’s very good at trying to think through how various constituencies will react to a particular policy.”

The Iraqis I spoke with tended to view Allawi with both detachment and respect. No one seemed to support him passionately, and most people felt that they still didn’t know him very well. They regarded him as a cunning pragmatist—a tough, capable man who had made the most of his relationship with the C.I.A. Allawi’s good standing with U.S. officials seemed to mean a lot to most Iraqis I spoke with, many of whom also believed that the Americans were determined to keep Allawi in office.

Negroponte dismissed this idea. He said, “Does Allawi have more to contribute? Yes, I think, definitely. Is he the only one? No. The Iraqis are going to have to work that one out.”

A prominent Iraqi politician, who is running for the National Assembly as a member of the religious Shiite coalition, told me that the Americans had quietly let the leading candidates know that there were three conditions that they expected the next Iraqi government to meet. “One, it should not be under the influence of Iran,” he said. “Two, it should not ask for the withdrawal of American troops. And, three, it should not install an Islamic state.” His Shiite coalition was projected to win a plurality of votes in the elections, and if it does, it will play a decisive role in choosing the country’s next leader. The candidate speculated that the victorious Shiites might well ask Allawi, rather than a religious cleric, to be Prime Minister. Such a gesture might help persuade the Americans and the Sunnis that the Shiites were not intent on establishing a theocracy. “If Iyad stays in the job, it could well be by default again,” he said. It would certainly make the Americans happy, he added. “The Americans have known this man for the past twenty-five years. They want someone they can rely on. Iyad is the devil they know.”

During a final conversation with Allawi, I suggested that he seemed comfortable with the power that the Americans had bestowed on him. He replied, “It’s a role that we have to have in Iraq—it’s the culture. You have to be powerful, you have to project your views in a powerful way, you have to—in the face of challenges and threats—stand tall and strong. If you give way in any way, the whole society will be destroyed. When you have to deal with terrorists, you have to deal with them in a very strong way. There is no middle-of-the-road solution.” He paused, then explained, “This is because of my background. You know, when you are a doctor in an operating theatre facing a sick patient, you have to make the best decision and you have to take risks. There is no middle road.”

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